Lending Voice to Thoughts

Our shower drain has a slow leak which is dripping on to our dining table. o_O Maintenance has been called.

Southerly - Cold wind coming off the Antarctica. (note: REALLY cold)
Northerly - Hot dry wind coming over the mountains. Kinda like the Santa Anna winds in So Cal.
Jetstream - DSL, Broadband, etc.
Nappy - Diaper

Icka!: Do they really call them 'Nappies'?
David: Yup.
Icka!: So when a kid says 'No Naps', they actually mean they don't want a diaper?
David: ....
David: I don't know...

We had a Southerly come through yesterday. To paraphrase a quote I can't quite remember where we got it from: It's Frikkin' COLD out here Mr. Bigglesworth!!!

When I got to my folks house from Tucson, I went through the duffels and left some of my winter gear with them, cause it's coming into Summer here, right? ~_~
Evidently the Christchurch area has about a 7 - 10 day cycle of rain and warm weather. The high today is about 18c / low to mid 60s.
Fortunately, I didn't leave all my cold-weather gear behind, but still... brrrrrrrrr *wanders around growling and snarling at the cold*

Got the phone up and running today, evidently no one at this flat has had a land-line in a while and the phone company had lost the record of one being here, so the guy who showed up thought he'd have to lay a whole new line. He was happy it was an easy job. ^__^

In the mean time, David's watching a Spanish CGI cartoon translated into Maori. Kinda funny.

Vocabulary Words:
Lolly - Candy. One of the Dairies had a bunch of bowls filled with candy covered with a sheet of plastic. You could pick 20 lollies for a dollar. (the schoolgirl looked like I was insane when I asked)
O.E. - Overseas Experience. Evidently it's a Kiwi tradition to head overseas for a year after getting out of high school and do stuff like backpack in Europe. (read of a similar tradition in Britain too)

Sometimes I think that I'm backwards. (note: not that everything around me is backwards, because logically, it was like this long before I arrived, so therefore I must be the one that's backwards.)

To find the sun you face north, instead of south. Light switches flip down, not up. Hot water tends to be on the right instead of the left. Drive on the left instead of the right, which means that right turns are big and left turns are small, resulting in having to brace differently in the car. (the 'oh shit'/Jesus handle is on the opposite side for one thing) It's going into Summer, not Winter, which means I really shouldn't be looking at doors and thinking that they need weather stripping to keep the heat in.
But really, it's the sun thing that's getting to me. Direction sense is a little fried at the moment. ~_~
Because I'm used to when you face the sun, it moves from left to right. Now it's moving right to left. @_@

Am taking advantage of the no net to burn stuff off my laptop. Which means the scanlations are down from 9 gig to 7. ^^;;

Um... yeah. Quiet day. Fun lines from watching C4 (-channel 5. o_O but they play Music Videos so who cares!! ) about a prize pack someone won:

(Written inside of a book:) Warning: Do not fuck up.

"A penetrating look at the world of dirty movies, but it's done quite tastefully you will find."

*watching the King Kong Preview*
"And Beauty saw the Beast, and Beauty stayed his hand."
Icka Musing: 'Beauty stayed his hand'. but Beauty's a chick... unless they mean that Kong's a Beauty? Hmm... Hey, that'd make a good slash fic!

And on that note, I must go beat some boys and see if we can get a TGZ chapter out or not... *cracks knuckles and stalks Saguru and Kaito*

Oh, hey... Lady Orla? Jaelle? Any internet service providers you'd recommend? We can't do a long term sign up or anything, cause we dunno if we're gonna be here for a whole year.

Tuesday 8 Nov

Thought today was Wednesday. Oops.

Vocabulary Words:

Flat - Apartment
Mobile - Cell Phone / Cellular

We now have a residence!!! XD XD Lease is for three months, with the option extend it later. It's tucked way back from the street, a tiny two bedroom place surrounded by tall trees and lots of vegetation. The main room, kitchen and laundry are the first floor, then you go up a tiny spiral staircase to the second floor with the bedrooms and bath. The toilet is in a separate room next to the shower and the sink.
It's also already furnished (yeah, wanna see you try to shove the furniture up -that- staircase *snicker*), so we don't hafta spend so much getting it outfitted. Price is decent too.
Interesting note: You pay rent by the week, not the month. o_O Also, when you pay the lease, instead of paying first and last month's rent, you have to have about four weeks worth of rent ready to pay down. Depending on who you rent from, either 2 or 3 weeks worth go down into a bond, which is sent to a third party to hold on to and the rest is the deposit. That way, when renter moves out, there's a neutral party to mediate if there's trouble and the owner can't just keep the money saying that the renter trashed the place.

It's also close to the central part of the city (we're in Christchurch, BTW) and the local stadium, in case we wanna catch a Rugby game. ^__^ hee hee.

David is off with his Dad looking at cars while I unpack and try to make the place feel more lived in. He was explaining that cars used to be really expensive down here, until some bright bloke got the idea to get the 3-4 year old cars that don't pass the emission tests in Japan, but still run good, and ship them down to NZ and auction them off.
They still have car dealerships, but every Tuesday and Thursday the big auction house auctions cars off. So we can pick up a car for a couple of thousand, drive it around for a year or so, then if we end up leaving the country, drop it off at the auction house and they'll sell it off and deposit the money on our account afterwards. ^___^ No problems!!!

Mobile phones are also different. For one thing, if you have a cell phone, it's an automatic 021 number at the front of it that the land lines don't have.
The other interesting thing is that it looks like most of them charge per phone call, not per minute. I don't know if there's a time limit or anything like that on them.

It kinda dawned on me that while I'm kinda teaching and explaining 'normal' life in NZ to people in the States (and else where, but most people are know are in the States), the reverse can also be true. People who live in NZ can find out what is 'normal' in the States at the same time. Um... does that make sense? *scratches head*

Anyway, I'm hungry, there's no food in the flat, so I'm gonna head out and see if we can find food and a net cafe to post this...

Before leaving, we went to lunch with 'Neechan at the Ookanami-yaki shop.
There was a ninja there, eating lunch. Not kidding. He even wore the same mask Kakashi does.

Don't think it's hit me that I'm in another country yet. It rarely hit when I was in Japan either. I look at the sky with the clouds in it and it just doesn't seem any different than if I were in Tucson or LA. *shrugs* People are people, no matter where you go. Same with towns and cities.

( the flight out )

Vocabulary Words:

Flat White - Coffee with milk already in it. When pouring tea, milk is put in first, then the tea. With coffee, it's coffee first, then the milk.
Rubbish - Not trash! If you want to throw something away, look for the Rubbish bin.
Trolley - It's not a shopping cart or a luggage cart at the airport, it's a trolley.

Also, at one of the grocery stores (named, get this, 'Countdown'), they had what pretty much amounts to a giant dishwasher for trolleys. It was a room as tall as a person, with room for two rows of about 10 trolleys each. And it washed the trolleys. They so need to introduce these to places in the States.

Feel really self-conscious about talking. No, that's not stopping me. But it's like pushing the words to the back of my mouth and talking with a few pebbles in my mouth to aid in the mumbling. So my accent is currently all over the place. ~_~

Have discovered a sport I think I could be a fan of watching. Rugby. Prolly helps that as we come out of the Terminal, first thing we see is the All Blacks (the NZ ruby team) trouncing Wales.
Sorry, mel_redcap, think we'll be rooting for different teams tho.

Speaking of which Mel, it looks like there's a chance that we'll be in Oz for a week starting on my birthday. (22 Nov) Wanna get together sometime? I still have a hardcover Conan vs Kid for you.

Status on which way the toilet's flush down under: Unknown.
So far the toilets all seem to flush straight ahead and I can't tell which way the water goes other than backwards.
-Toilet shape is also taller and more narrow than the ones in the States, BTW. The water tank doesn't rest on the back of the seat either, but rests a foot or so above the seat, a narrow pipe leading down. (ever notice that when ever we go travelling, we end up describing the toilets? o_O)